Catching the Nightjar

By Chloë Walford, Rachel O'Callaghan and Louis Delahaye

Every Bird Loves to Hear Himself Sing...

To her aunt and cousins, Ophélie Davenport is as wise as she is inaccessible. Behind her gaze she hides a harrowing past, one she must confront when her uncle and guardian inherits Baudières-the ghostly estate from which Ophélie was banished as a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brass Loupe Publishing
• Release date: Jul 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781739908935

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Chloë Walford

Catching the Nightjar

First published by Brass Loupe Publishing 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Chloë Walford

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Chloë Walford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Second edition

ISBN: 978-1-7399089-3-5

Illustration by Rachel O'Callaghan

Illustration by Louis Delahaye

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This novel was written for all those who roam the world’s periphery.

Preface

As a child, I spent many summers amid the sun-soaked fields of rural Provence. I could describe every inch of that old farmhouse from memory—the dried corn hanging from the ceiling beams, Mr Chauvin’s cherry tree creaking in the heat, and the eternal metronome of the cicada.

It was there that I made two important discoveries: firstly, that my love of France ran deeper than a fondness of its language, later guiding me from a Bachelor’s degree to calling Paris home for many years; the second was a chapel perched on a mountain ridge that my siblings and I came across once during a hike.

Judging by its exterior, the stone had undergone centuries of sun, snow, and wind. Its location, however—a fifty-minute climb from the village—indicated that this secluded place of worship was no longer the locals’ choice for Sunday Mass. With barely room for nine chairs inside, it was difficult to imagine a service ever having taken place there, but the pot of wilting flowers on the altar swiftly ended our assumption that we had been the first group to venture this far. So, too, did the tea-coloured letter hanging on the wall.

A series of enquiries to our neighbours would reveal that the origin of this document remained something of a mystery. Legend told that it had washed up in a bottle on a beach over a hundred years ago. Its author? Unknown. If a signature had ever existed, it had long been destroyed by the sea on its journey from wherever the bottle was thrown.

In time, a combination of curiosity and my acquisition of more reliable linguistic skills brought me back to the chapel. What I found when I translated the letter has stayed with me since, and it is this message that I wish to share with you now:

My dear friend,

Michel de Montaigne once wrote that ‘the greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself’. Today, these words fill me with meaning, for I have finally come to realise that the more I see of the people in this world, the more I am able to understand them.

I, like everyone, am part of an expanding tapestry, held together by thousands of interconnected threads. Beauty, strength, fear, loneliness; these are not qualities of which one can either be in possession or wanting—they are the strands of humanity itself, upon which each of us is placed differently, from one end to another.

This is, I believe, the essence of what unites us, along with one simple but ever-neglected truth: that wherever we may fall on these threads, we are lucky to have been part of the tapestry at all.

* * *

I

Summer

1

The Ritual

22 October 1871, The Moreau Institute of Botany and Horticulture, Aixelles, France.

Murky clouds were swallowing the sky as Isabelle entered the gardens of the Institute. Beneath the marble steps, her nurse steadied her hands to secure the girl’s leg brace. Once the last leather strap was in place, she peered back over her shoulder.

With Mr and Mrs Moreau out at a dinner party, there was little risk of her being berated for not encouraging their daughter to use her walking stick—or for granting Isabelle some fresh air before bedtime for that matter. And so she escorted Isabelle down the gravel path, carrying the girl’s body weight against her own.

It was a bleak autumn day, the air heavy and agitated. Early signs of fog had relieved the groundskeepers of their duties for the afternoon. The resident grasshoppers seemed to have followed suit. Beneath the blanket of stillness formed by their departure, nature’s stirrings warned of something more sinister than a storm though.

The wind encircled Isabelle as she sat by the greenhouses, humming to her doll. Even the trees from the orchards seemed to be stretching their crooked limbs towards her with every murmur of the breeze.

At five o’clock, the echoes of a woodpecker drew the attention of Isabelle’s nurse to the time.

If she returned the girl’s medicine bottle to the house now then she could instruct the cooks to have Isabelle’s dinner ready within half an hour. That just left her bath, which Isabelle would hopefully be too tired to refuse, the nurse told herself as she hastened back up the path. And if this outing worked and the child could remain calm, she might not need to be restrained to her bed tonight.

With this thought, the nurse’s hands stopped shaking. She even allowed herself to fetch her gloves and button up her coat in the hallway mirror on her way back from the kitchen.

Instinct had not deceived her; when she re-emerged through the French windows moments later, the mist had risen to the level of her waist and the air felt sharper. To the nurse’s confusion, so too did the accompanying silence.

Step after step, it dawned on her that neither the woodpecker nor Isabelle’s humming were audible anymore. The girl must simply have moved on to another game, she attempted to reassure herself as she reached the midway point through the gardens. But when the nurse’s calls became shrieks and they, too, went unanswered, she picked up her pace to a breathless sprint.

Her legs buckled when she reached the spot where she had left Isabelle to play.

Atop the dirt lay only the twisted body of her doll. Beside it, a single set of footprints led the nurse to the fence separating the gardens from the woods. And there—fluttering from a nail in the loose planks—hung the powder blue sash from Isabelle’s dress.

The sight was enough to drive her nurse back through the house and into the streets. Before long, the entire village had been alerted to the disappearance.

A hoax, a childish game; the elapsing minutes saw theories surge among the search party. Nobody, it seemed, could bring themselves to utter what everyone was thinking. With each cry of Isabelle’s name, the expectation of finding her in a favourite comfort spot or hiding place felt more remote nevertheless, until finally they came—the distant but unmistakable screams of a scene too harrowing for words having been discovered.

From the woods behind Isabelle’s body, demands for answers were met forthwith in the form of Kacper Smolak—a notorious local trader—stumbling towards the group. In his coat pocket, the ransom note to Mr and Mrs Moreau offered a motive for the abduction; across his face and torso, child-size scratches confirmed their suspicions that the gentleman had not accounted for Isabelle fighting back.

Appalled by the suspect’s laconism, justice would be swift by the powers that be. Kacper Smolak’s execution took place on 15 November 1871 and was attended by an audience so large, in fact, that spectators all but mounted each other’s shoulders to witness it.

And yet, absent from the heckling crowds were the voices that had summoned them—the men and women of Isabelle’s village. Their faces would not fill the pews of church that Sunday either. No, for this community, retribution would apparently take another form.

Adorned with candles, they would assemble by the lakeside every November thereafter, greeting nightfall with a curse for the ‘wicked Polack’ who had ended an infant’s life for money.

Twilight’s descent on this tradition induced a collective ache for morning, but as uneasy heads lay to rest each year, another ritual would only be beginning for one individual among them.

From the top floor of the Institute, the gentleman typically commenced by wiping his glasses while he waited for the corridors below to fall silent. Next, he would remove a white handkerchief from his pocket and sketch his pseudonym above a new entry in his notebook.

‘The Watcher’; it was a name he had come to adopt in recent years, but not one for which he could claim ownership—the term had been thrown at him in childhood after a family friend lost his nerve, demanding to know why the boy was staring at him so fixedly.

The gentleman liked to revisit this memory often in his writings. On these hallowed November nights, however, he found that he could manage only the words:

Another anniversary has gone by, Ortus, and still she is not here.

From the threadbare handkerchief in his hands to the shelves on the far wall, his gaze, like the muscles in his neck, would then stiffen, until once again they swarmed his ears—those faithful whispers reminding their listener that his reward for the killing of Isabelle Moreau drew nearer.

2

Pandora’s Box

4 June 1881, Baudières Estate, Aixelles, France.

With a final heave, Arnaud Baudin cleared his lungs of another layer of mucus, then relaxed in his armchair and tossed the blood-spattered tissue onto the growing pile atop the bin. As the pain subdued, he glanced at his pocket watch again to gauge how much longer he would have to wait until morning.

21:13; incredulous, given the amber sunlight attempting to penetrate his library from the crack between the curtains. Over the haze of recent weeks, spring must have turned into the first tedious days of summer, Arnaud concluded. And there, surrounded by his closest companions—the great philosophers in whose works he had spent a lifetime seeking refuge—the old man prepared himself for a long night ahead.

Shifting his weight onto his feet, the sensation of being upright without assistance felt as unstable as it had the first time he had learnt to walk. Step by step, Arnaud pushed through the shakiness and approached the glass cabinet behind the door. The object of his mobilisation? A particular key he had refrained from using for a decade.

While there was no shortage of locked rooms in Baudières, Arnaud’s estate, the item he wished to access was a small wooden chest by the fireplace, on which the gentleman’s housekeeper had resorted to stacking his post. Evidently, she had ceased subjecting herself to this daily balancing act ten months ago; the most recent addition to the pile was a flyer dated August 1880, promoting the first in a series of region-wide cavalcades to commemorate twenty years since Savoie voted to become French.

Glaring down at the red and white cross at its centre, Arnaud rolled his eyes.

Ever since the Capetian dynasty, the Baudin family’s own coat of arms had been tied to a small castle in Burgundy. Despite its foundations having survived the early days of the Revolution unscathed, Arnaud had been happy to forego his claim to the land as its sole remaining heritor. Being a doctor and a self-professed ‘citizen of his own microcosm’, the ten-mile span of Lake Annecy, instead, would put a convenient distance between the gentleman and the din of French politics, he had reasoned. As such, watching Napoleon III’s ship laud before his window in the summer of 1860 had proven exacting.

Shrugging off the flashback, Arnaud ripped the flyer in half and swept the remaining letters onto the floor. He was in no doubt about what the tumbling envelopes contained; messages from budding medics, desperate to learn from the man who—according to an interview of Europe’s most revered practitioners in their heyday—had surpassed all feats in life. Decluttered of these insufferable accolades, their recipient creaked open the chest and peered inside.

Toys, doodles, trinkets the size of a thumb coming alive in the candlelight; such mementoes could never have belonged to the doctor himself, nor to his children for that matter. Where the former was concerned, Arnaud’s infant souvenirs were limited to the image of his parents fading into estrangement with the successive deaths of his seven siblings. As regards the latter, his disappointment ran somewhat deeper.

In hindsight, it was only the beauty of youthful idealism that had allowed the doctor to contemplate building a family of his own when a tolerable enough woman came along. His wife’s premature passing had caused him minimal grief, and on the odd occasion that Arnaud had set aside time for his sons or daughter, he had been decidedly unimpressed by Roland, Henri, and Gabrielle—the three protegés destined to follow in his footsteps. No, the shrivelled daisy chains and papier-mâché globes staring up at him had been put together by a very different set of hands.

Upon his next breath, the doctor dropped to his knees and extended his fingers towards the crumpled letter nearest the top. It was a statement addressed to Arnaud himself, written by a teacher at the local school:

Dear Dr Baudin,

As well you know, your granddaughter continues to be regarded as our most valued pupil in both her courteous interactions with others and her advanced faculty for learning. However, I feel I must inform you of a worrisome account of Miss Ophélie Davenport that was reported to have occurred yesterday in front of the school.

The incident pertains to a Mr Louis Fabron—the older brother of another pupil—whose parents claim that he returned home from collecting his sister in a most distressing state.

From witnesses, I have pieced together this narrative: that Mr Fabron exited his family’s carriage after our last class was dismissed, whereupon he proceeded to tease Miss Davenport about her use of a walking stick. His gibes then extended to others in the vicinity, I am told, until your granddaughter beckoned Mr Fabron over and whispered something in his ear that rendered the boy frightfully taciturn. Despite repeated calls to procure the words that she told him, both parties have been unwilling to divulge this information.

While I remain sympathetic to your granddaughter’s tragic handicap and condemn any attempts to make light of it, I trust you will encourage Miss Davenport to confess to whatever hurtful rebuke she employed, and ensure that such retaliation is not resorted to again. This act was extremely out of character for Ophélie.

Yours sincerely,

Mrs Anne Chevrette.

Prompted by this recollection, Arnaud gripped the side of the chest for composure, before reaching back in to unearth other keepsakes from the four years that his granddaughter had lived with him.

For better or worse, it was all there—a collection of memories that was at once complete and utterly wanting; the puzzles that the pair had constructed, the pieces of clothing she had left behind, and hardest of all to confront again, a scrap of paper hosting the message I love you, that Ophélie had given him ‘for the times when he felt her distant’.

This was the trigger that sent the doctor retreating to his armchair with the prostration of a convict. Unable to tear his attention from these words, Arnaud failed to notice his library receding into darkness inch by inch, or dawn’s overture commencing beneath the window.

The next time he remembered to check his pocket watch, the time was 6:14 and his lengthy wait had nearly come to an end. In under an hour, his solicitor would be arriving to see to his final orders. By now, the doctor could only hope that his calculations had been correct and that if nothing else, the jaws of death would have closed around him long before Ophélie’s return.

Commensurate with his reputation for timeliness, Mr Girard knocked on the door at seven o’clock sharp and waited for confirmation to let himself in. Using the dim radius of the desk lamp as his guide, the solicitor followed Arnaud’s ensuing request and made his way over to the seat beside his armchair. At this point, his eyes had adjusted to the obscurity enough to remark that the plate of food left out for the doctor’s dinner the previous evening had gone untouched. The same could not be said for the bottle of cognac lying next to it.

Eyes unmoving from the floorboards, Arnaud sucked his pipe twice, before delivering the instruction: Let us cut to the chase. I need you to send three letters, Julien.

Certainly, Dr Baudin. Nodding solemnly, the solicitor retrieved a pen and a suitable piece of paper from his briefcase and continued: Who is to be the first recipient?

Whichever pillock runs the Residents’ Council these days, Arnaud muttered.

That would be Mr Eduard de Corbiac, sir, Mr Girard replied awkwardly. And the subsequent two?

My sons.

Mr Girard fell silent. Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, he allowed himself a minute to clear his throat, before responding: And what is the message?

3

The Letter

The hamlet of Petit Pin sat atop a quiet, narrow valley, thirty miles from the city of Nantes. Comprising only a farm, a flour mill, and six cottages scattered around a stone well, it was the sort of settlement you would have to go out of your way to stumble across. City-dwellers would find that one day there rolled slowly and indistinguishably into the next; those seeking solitude would take comfort in sitting on a wall and listening to the wind whistle through the surrounding wheat fields.

For generations, the people of Petit Pin had been agricultural workers—the kind, honest folk you would expect to find in a place where the postman’s wagon pottering up the lane was cause for excitement. Once a fortnight, they might convene in a barn to play music together, or share a drink in somebody’s kitchen at the end of a long afternoon. Front doors in Petit Pin remained permanently open throughout the summer months, in fact—all except one.

Separated from the others by half the valley slope, it was inhabited by Arnaud Baudin’s elder son, Roland, his wife, Camille, their three children, and their niece. And in this cottage, nothing—least of all hospitality—could disrupt the bliss of routine.

Having concluded that the job of a clerk did not agree with him, Roland Baudin had been enjoying early retirement in Petit Pin for the last sixteen years. Each morning after breakfast, he would descend to his office armed with a cup of tea and two madeleines. An interlude of reading in his armchair was then common practice, before the gentleman would settle at the desk to resume painting the figurines in his replica of the Battle of Waterloo. Should the notion carry him, Mr Baudin might factor in a turn of the room to neaten his immaculate displays of soldiers, foliage, and weaponry, but this deviation was contingent on his having the energy to do so.

Midway through applying a splash of red to Napoleon’s collar that morning, the gentleman was to face two confrontations of a startling nature. An overconfident wasp first dared to break his concentration, forcing him to spend several minutes with a rolled-up newspaper locating and eventually slaying the beast. The second disturbance was the rarer and more unsettling sight of his wife’s smile after she thundered down the staircase and into the office, clutching an envelope that she had already taken the liberty of opening.

Do you have any idea what this means, Roland? We must begin arrangements at once, was the breathless explanation that left Mrs Baudin’s lips as she slapped the letter onto his desk.

Now, to the average person, the news of an elderly family member’s deteriorating health might be received with some expression of concern—sincere or otherwise. As it happened, Camille Baudin prided herself on being an equalist. By this, I mean that having grown up on the outskirts of Nantes—deprived of the many ‘privileges’ her husband had enjoyed—it was only fitting to Mrs Baudin that this imbalance be redressed later down the line.

You could hardly be surprised, then, that when her eyes scanned the letter warning Roland that his father had been seized by a chest infection and was showing little sign of recovery, Camille would waste no time in orchestrating the family’s installation in his estate. On a practical level, her haste merely spared them from having to make the journey to Baudières in winter. Or, at least, Mrs Baudin insisted this was the case when her husband voiced his reluctance to leave Petit Pin until after his father had passed away.

I cannot believe you would have us trek across the country in blizzards, Camille snapped, striding back and forth as if mirroring a pendulum. "No doubt Thomas will be thrilled to learn that his father wants him to remain unhappy with his tutor here when he has the option to attend a real school elsewhere. And what about the girls, Roland, and your niece? They should be in charge of their own households by now, yet you content yourself to delay their chances of marriage by keeping them cooped up in this wasteland for a few more months?"

Her husband rearranged his paintbrushes on the desk and sighed. You have made your point, Camille. I shall write to Mr Girard informing him that we shall be with them at Baudières before the summer is out.

And like the successful defusing of a bomb, there it was: silence. While Roland sank into his armchair, his wife rushed upstairs to break the news to the next generation of Baudins.

Having never left their hamlet—let alone the province—in twenty-two years, Camille’s twin daughters instantly abandoned their card game to speculate about the properties of their new home. That Arnaud Baudin was a ‘cantankerous old snob’ who had made his fortune as some sort of doctor was the extent of what Manon and Adèle had been told about their